A novel elasto-plastic constitutive model of self-healing materials is proposed coupling continuum damage–healing mechanics (CDHM) framework with kinematic and isotropic hardening cases. A novel secondary damage internal variable is presented, eliminating an assumption in the existing literature that the healed area does not undergo damage again, thus improving the existing CDHM framework. The necessity of the proposed secondary damage variable is successfully demonstrated by a four spring material model. The improved CDHM framework is coupled with the three-dimensional elasto-plastic formulation containing nonlinear kinematic hardening and isotropic strain hardening effects. The proposed formulation is finally numerically implemented by return mapping approach employing the strain energy equivalence hypothesis from CDHM, and the macro-scale stress update is performed applying several different strain histories. A continuum tangent modulus expression is also derived, and a boundary value problem is successfully solved employing an in-house developed plane strain nonlinear finite element code. It is finally demonstrated, by the numerical results, that the secondary damage variable is crucial while obtaining the physically realistic stress–strain response of self-healing materials leading to the complete failure upon exhaustion of the healing capabilities. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd